Meet the scientist
Professor Steve Ormerod on dippers and microplastics
S The rocky river was the natural haunt of this busy bird — and Ormerod, as it turned out. T
A life working with dippers reveals the extent of plastic pollution in our rivers, and how those microplastics are making their way through the food-web.
The humble dipper has played a leading role in Ormerod’s over 30-year scientific career. The bird first found a special place in his affections some time before it became of professional interest, probably when his father took him to see the salmon jump the falls on the River Ribble, not far from his
Burnley childhood home. The rocky river was the natural haunt of this busy little bird – and Ormerod, as it turned out.
When the deputy chairman of Natural his he realised research Resources what career a good Wales in the indicator began 1980s, species the dipper was when it came to the environmental quality of a river. He was studying the impact of acid raid on invertebrates and his research was the first to demonstrate its impact on birds – it caused them to lay eggs with thinner shells because of the lack of calciumrich prey. of Based Ormerod’s at Cardiff research University, is carried much out on the South Wales rivers that the mining industry had rendered the most polluted on Earth. There has been an incredible recovery over the past 50 years, to the extent that salmon have returned, but there is still a legacy of that industrial past.
Ormerod refers to dippers as the “canary in the coal mine” of the river system. “All this work is going on for plastics in the oceans, but no one [was] really looking at it in rivers,” he says. His latest research on dippers and microplastics built on previous work published in 2016 on microplastics and invertebrates.
“Every other insect in the River Taff system was contaminated by plastics,” explains Ormerod. “Once dippers are on those same rivers, it becomes almost inevitable that they must are Ormerod’s in be their ingesting invertebrate study the revealed plastics prey.” that that dippers 200 microplastic were consuming particles about a day, but almost all of it was transitory – it was passing straight through.
“There is a huge question mark about whether it does any damage as it goes through, but all of it is not in them permanently,” he says. Looking back on his work so far,
Ormerod reflects that “you see all these incredible coincidences and the logic in the next step that you took.”
As a younger man, Ormerod’s PhD studied the impact of a dam-building project on the water chemistry and invertebrate communities of the River Wye system. Coincidentally, the RSPB was studying dipper populations on the rivers at the same time, and they put the data sets together and noticed a correlation.
“My PhD supervisor grew apoplectic because I started writing papers about dippers, which had nothing to do with my PhD, and my PhD was delayed by about three years as a consequence!” The bigger picture has emerged over the span Andrew Griffiths of a career.